Join The DotAs: Ring Runner: Space Defense League

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A previous attempt at describing space shooter Ring Runner ended up with my keyboard being taken away from me. It was for my own good: the game is basically every game ever bundled up into a top-down shoooter. After entering the third day of describing it, the RPS CMS worriedly informed the authorities: I was gently removed from my seat, my hands clawed and my eyes locked open, and Adam took my place. I got better, so I’m allowed to tell you that Ring Runner expanding with a free a DotA-inspired mode. Ring Runner: Space Defense League will be free to everyone who bought the original, but it’ll also be released as a standalone paid-for game as well.
It makes sense. The big thing about RR was the ship customisation. It ran the gamut of obvious space ships blasting lasers into the void, and into ridiculous builds that fire space boomerangs. There are hundreds of possible combinations, which can easily be the heroes of the new mode. So with those in place, and giant space stations, AI drones, and turrets to fight co-operatively, it’s not a big sea change to rearrange it all into a DotA/MOBA thing.

Of course, the question then is why you’d want to attempt to make a noise in an already loud genre, but Space Defense League does appear to be bringing a few new tricks to the lane-pushers. The free expansion is out now, and the standalone will be out in a “few weeks”. Oh, and they’d like to be on Steam.

It was the first MOBA I played without knowing what a MOBA is. I just played and kinda did what I thought was right.
After countless hours in Dota 2 I believe what I did back then was horrible and stupid and It took a unforgiving game to show me that. But I’ll always remember the moment when I and my friends backdoored a team with a much stronger lineup, after abandoning the other members of our useless noob team.

Our first date was great, it talked about inertia and physics and slowly dragged me through some fairly basic stuff – it was a bit nannying but it promised lots more and so I stuck with it.

and then all hell breaks loose – you’ve been slowly manoevering your ship around, swearing-a-bit at the areas where “background” and “obstacle” are indistinguiable and you’re dropped-into an arena and the AI is darting around like mad, it’s blinking/teleporting and it’s smashing into you constantly – and you have to compete with that in a ship which has lazy thrust and dampeners and loads of inertia and you’re being pinballed all over the place and….

I know they reined-in the tutorial but even if you skip it (which I eventually had to do as it was grinding my gears) the game doesn’t let-up on this stuff – yup, there’s loads of ideas in there but not a lot of it fits together.

I suspect, being a space game, people will happily cherry-pick the bits they like and turn-off or ignore the bits they don’t but I just couldn’t get over the fact I was given a control system and the AI was doing something completely different.

It felt like I was playing a floaty FPS whilst everyone else had speed-ups and rocket boots…

There is a ‘highlight obstacles’ option (there’s an option for almost everything – in fact) but it just draws a 1 pixel outline around stuff which isn’t pretty AND shows-off the slightly dodgy collision boundaries for things a bit-too-much.

I’m sure there’s a solid game in there – somewhere – but like many space games it’s intent on making you work to find it and I just ran out of will (I’m a bit crap at games which require work tho – give me pointers, arrows, targets, achievements – DIRECTION!)

Why theres no news about PES league that seems pretty common in Asian country?? Yeah I know, most of them played in Console, but PES PC communitty are quite active in some of the country (like in my country, or the one I arranged with some of my friend)

Sorry about the rant, just tired waiting for PES 2014 WiT from RPS (like if there ‘s any chance for it :D )

Actually, from what I gather, the game comes with a large campaign story mode that mixes things up a lot: moving you to different ships and circumstances constantly. So it’s not very repetitive at all, in that regard. But it is interesting feedback to consider that it looks repetitive to you. I wonder why you got that impression?